The Workshop

Following the successful workshops in 2012 and 2013, we are looking forward to organizing the third edition of this event, to be again held in conjunction with the ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS conference.

The Internet, mobile and sensor revolutions continue to generate new
data and data types, new uses of data, as well as new applications. At
the same time, the equations of the data economy are being redefined
as authorities continue to open up further their data repositories,
whilst at the same time individuals and online communities are
generating valuable data and are increasingly making them publicly
available. Much of the generated data has a prominent geographic
footprint, and this explosion of such volunteered geographicinformation (VGI) amounts to a massive expansion in our ability to
digitize the world.

The domain that we aim to address in the workshop has been
characterized by terms such as “geographic information retrieval,”
“crowdsourcing,” “geospatial (semantic) Web,” “linked geospatial
data,” and the “GeoWeb 2.0.”

This workshop aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners
from the above areas to discuss open research problems and to develop
a research agenda for the future. This workshop will also serve as a
common platform for the exchange of ideas and results coming from
existing research initiatives and projects in the US and Europe that
currently investigate this topic.

Participants of the workshop are invited to address the following research questions that are fundamental for future developments in VGI:

How do we combine geospatial and Web data models and languages to model the geospatial data available in the Web today? How do we express queries?

What data structures, algorithms and implemented systems are appropriate for the management of VGI? What are appropriate benchmarks for the measuring the performance and comparing existing systems?

How can we develop user interfaces for VGI? What are appropriate high-level APIs that ease the rapid development of such user interfaces? Can we build on already deployed platforms such as GoogleMaps, BingMaps or OpenStreetMap?

How can we take advantage of user-generated geospatial content? How can we crowdsource high-quality geospatial datasets? What are candidate data fusion techniques?

What are interesting applications of the Geospatial Web in target sectors such as environment, leisure, transportation, earth observation etc.?